WILLIAM WEBSTER IN THE OKLAHOMA SPOTLIGHT

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP99-01448R000401630002-3
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 25, 2012
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: March 22, 1991
• Content Type: LETTER

STAT
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/25: CIA-RDP99-01448R000401630002-3
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/25: CIA-RDP99-01448R000401630002-3
 Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/25: CIA-RDP99-01448R000401630002-3
AMERICAN SURVEY
LEXINGTON
William Webster in the Oklahoma spotlight
?COMETHING", boomed Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the
V Democratic senator from New York, "happened. The cold
war came to an end. This was big." And so, to mark the event, he
introduced a bill into the Senate, entitled, of course, The End of
the Cold War Act.
As is Mr Moynihan's style, the bill is a serious point mas-
querading as a joke. Its central message is that, Gorbachevian
second thoughts permitting, it is time to reassess the purpose of
the things America did during the cold war. One of the first
things it did (in 1947) was to establish a Central Intelligence
Agency, so Mr Moynihan has already cast an eye on the 219-acre
site of the ctA across the Po-
tomac in Langley. His mod-
est proposal would transfer
the ciA's functions and peo-
ple to the State Department,
and make the secretary of
state also director of central
intelligence (Dci). When the
cA was born, it aimed to be
"bigger than State by '48",
and it did not take much
longer to achieve its goal, ac-
cording to those who claim
to know how big it is. Now,
argues Mr Moynihan, is the
time to cut it down to size.
The cIA and its director,
William Webster, need not
worry too much about being
moved to Foggy Bottom.
They do have to worry about
what Congress has in store
for them. David McCurdy,
the new chairman of the
House Intelligence Commit-
tee, plans to review funda-
mentally the structures and
priorities of those who spy for their country. He will be joined in
the work by David Boren, his fellow Oklahoman who chairs the
Intelligence Committee in the Senate.
Who's the boss?
The Oklahomans do not expect to find anything like the Iran-
contra mess, or the illegalities unearthed in the 1970s. Their
stated purpose is to consider the ciA's priorities for the 1990s,
and to assess how competent it is to achieve them. An unstated
purpose on the part of some of their colleagues is to assess
whether Mr Webster is the right man for the job.
Mr Webster ("nice man to play tennis with" is one current
bit of damning-with-faint-praise) does not have it easy. He was
the second choice for the post of Dcl in 1987, after the death of
William Casey. Robert Gates, Mr Casey's deputy, was first
choice but the Senate deemed him too tarred by the Iran-contra
brush. As president, George Bush quickly appointed Mr Gates
to be his deputy national security adviser-a post which does not
require Senate confirmation. Ever since there has been a palpa-
ble feeling that Mr Bush, who was himself once the boss at Lang-
ley, is his own Dcl, with Mr Gates as his in-house deputy.
Mr Webster has never been in Mr Bush's inner circle. The
agency was criticised by some in the administration for poor
work in Panama in 1989. In Congress, Mr Moynihan has en-
joyed tearing into three decades of woeful ciA overstatements of
the strength of the Soviet economy. Late last year Congress chal-
lenged the agency head-on. It passed a $30 billion budget for
intelligence, but insisted on being informed of requests for for-
eign or private help in covert operations.
Mr Bush refused to sign the bill, which lapsed and will have
to be reintroduced; and the administration has continued its
counter-attack on Congress. When Tom Foley, the speaker of
the House, appointed Mr McCurdy, a moderate Democrat, as
chairman, he also named four liberals to committee vacancies.
The administration muttered about grave disquiet, secrets com-
promised and so on, trying
to throw Congress back on
to the defensive.
Such tactics will not
work. The agency is in the
doghouse partly because Mr
Webster lost credibility in
Congress when he seemed
confused about the effective-
ness of sanctions against
Iraq, reinforcing the sense
that the Gulf is not the CIA's
strong suit. The c1A has had
an unhappy time in the Mid-
dle East ever since the Ira-
nian revolution of 1979.
Some of its best people were
lost in the bombing of the
embassy in Lebanon in 1983.
Western hostages remain im-
prisoned. The United States,
until last August, looked a
fumbler. The cIA insists it
predicted the invasion of Ku-
wait and was ignored. (Did
it, and why was it ignored?)
The Boren-McCurdy
examination will aim to find out how well-fitted the spies are for
other end-of-the-cold-war challenges. What expertise does the
cIA have on the nationality issue in the Soviet Union, for exam-
ple? The ciA insists that it has switched its priorities away from
merely assessing Soviet military might towards drugs and the
proliferation of military weapons, such as ballistic missiles and
nerve gas, while continuing its work on counter-terrorism. Some
congressmen think that only the nameplates have been changed.
There will be controversy, too, over the desire of some intelli-
gence chiefs to expand their brief into "economic intelligence",
which seems to mean finding out what other countries (presum-
ably Japan) are planning that may undermine America's
economy.
When men who have spent a career counting submarines in
the Baltic try to work out what the new version of a Sony
Walkman will look like, espionage stops being a profession and
starts being a joke. Mr Moynihan would argue that it always has
been pretty worthless (he asks why the cIA failed to give warning
of the unpopularity of the Shah of Iran). Mr McCurdy would
not go so far; his model is the Defence Department, which, he
argues, has made a genuine effort to reassess its task at a time of
falling budgets. He would like the CIA to do the same. But the
former Dct in the Oval Office still has a taste for espionage, and
will need convincing of the need for change.
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/25: CIA-RDP99-01448R000401630002-3